A liquid sampler which provides a receptacle and a releasably sealable receptacle cover having at least two apertures each of which can be configured to adjust the flow rate of an amount of liquid into the liquid sampler upon submersion into a liquid.
A conventional practice of sampling non-flowing surface water and most flowing surface water is to submerge an open ended receptacle or bottle into the surface water to collect a water sample. The receptacle or bottle containing the water sample can be sealed by with a cover or cap. The water sample obtained by collection with such a conventional sampler generates a water sample representative of the water at a single substantially fixed location over the duration of time required to fill the open ended receptacle. Because an open ended receptacle provides little or no restriction on the rate at which liquid flows into the receptacle or bottle, the duration of time over which the water sample is collected can be relatively short and the duration of time cannot be adjusted.
Another conventional practice of water sampling utilizes a closed receptacle having a tube which projects outwardly from the receptacle a distance sufficient to allow collection of an isokinetic sample in a flowing surface water, such as rivers or streams (for example see conventional samplers available from the United States Geological Survey). This conventional practice allows collection of a water sample which includes a representative sample of the suspended particulate in a sample of flowing surface water. While this type of conventional water sampler can provide an isokinetic sample of flowing surface water, collection of an isokinetic sample of a flowing water may not be necessary in the case of collecting samples of non-flowing surface water (for example from a lake or pond) or may not be desired even in the case of flowing surface water when a representative sample of the suspended particulate in the flowing surface water is not required or desirable. Additionally, these types of water samplers can be expensive relative to utilizing an open ended receptacle as above-described.
Despite advances in the art of water samplers and methods of water sampling, there remains a need for configurations of samplers which are relatively inexpensive and methods of sampling which allow flowing or non-flowing waters or other liquids to be sampled over greater durations of time than afforded by conventional open ended receptacles and which further provides sampling over a duration of time sufficient to collect water samples or other liquid samples as the liquid sampler travels a distance in the water or other liquid sample.